I am so grateful for the positive responses to the last two posts in this series that I’m continuing without delay, before the deadline doom of the next few months eats my head again. Let’s see how many of these I can get through.
Improving Bastions | 2026-01-04 20:27:38 +0000 UTC View Post
I had fun revising the first few Bastion Special Facilities in my previous post, so today I’m doing a few more. I’m still not sure what I want to do with the Barrack, beyond adding an -s to the end as most English speakers would, so I’m starting with the Garden.
2025-12-12 17:27:50 +0000 UTC View PostI’ve talked before about what a mess I think the 2024 DMG’s Bastion rules are. With all respect to the designers, I think there are good LEGOs in the pile, but this arrangement of them doesn’t serve the needs of the game or the story.
First, I’ll recapitulate the things I see as the issues, even if I don’t go deep on all of them in this post.
· I think it’s fine for Bastion tu...
2025-12-01 18:02:47 +0000 UTC View PostIt’s another year of blogging done, even if the last few months have been very thin around here. Some of my big clients have had steady work for me, and Citadel has taken whatever was left over from that. We’ll see how that develops over the next year.
1. Aurikesh has just hit 13 years and 169 sessions, with 170 coming up this weekend. We’re still having a great time, and still haven’t made...
2025-11-21 03:29:22 +0000 UTC View PostFor Halloween, Kainenchen put together an awesome good-witch costume. Not in, you know, the Oz sense, though she’s also just finished rereading The Wizard of Oz and picked up the next book. Anyway, this subclass hasn’t seen any review from the Worlds Beyond Number team, but it was commissioned by a higher authority (Kainenchen asked nicely). This class goes with the Worlds Beyond Number Witch class, 2025-10-30 00:55:08 +0000 UTC View Post
This past weekend (19-21 September 2025), we ran the third three-day event for Citadel LARP, at Booker T State Park in Tennessee. Serella Savenko and I created another puzzle box, our most elaborate design so far by a very wide margin. We were initially building it to go into play at the July event, but that absolutely was not going to happen so we built the 2025-09-22 17:07:10 +0000 UTC View Post
The use of hirelings isn’t nearly as common in D&D as it once was, but I think we should bring that back a bit. In addition to shoring up a party’s weakness and draining some cash out of their coffers, hirelings also provide someone who can die horribly to showcase a monster’s sick dance moves. Oh, and they make great backup characters for when a dragon eats the one guy in the party who can Raise Dead and you’re a week away from anyone else who could.
Anywa...
2025-08-06 00:02:19 +0000 UTC View PostWhat follows is a microgame that I wrote for Dancing Stickman's LAARG project on Bluesky (which is why the text refers to posting your playthrough on Bluesky). I don't work in the microgame space, um, ever, but I enjoyed writing this, and I hope you'll enjoy it too.
In which magic is lost and might be regained, if your reach does not exceed your grasp.
In The Merciless Snare of Sorcery, you play a witch who has lost control of a spell. In...
2025-07-26 18:30:26 +0000 UTC View PostWe ran a one-day event for Citadel LARP this past weekend (19 July), and we put our second puzzle box design into play this time. Serella Savenko helped me with every step of planning and building this one. I want to thank Elena Simon for providing the box itself, and Laurie Zolkosky for driving back to Atlanta to get the damn box because I… left it on my living room floor.
Not even the Ranger has had as many UA releases thrown at it as the Psion (née Mystic). Searching through the dusty, moldering archives of this very website, I see that I last wrote a UA breakdown about psionics in 2020, but it was already in good company. I was genuinely surprised to see a new attempt, because I honestly thought the Aberrant Min...
2025-06-06 19:44:51 +0000 UTC View PostI haven’t written an UA breakdown in a hot minute—the last one was before the three core books of 2024-25 dropped!—but this drop sucked me back in. Part of this is to find out where the reading audience is these days. I’m sad to see that they’ve dropped bylines for UA articles; I liked knowing whose ideas I was reading.
Also, the very short turnaround on this feedback window is a travesty. I’m sure they have reasons, but since the first Artificer UA dropped during t...
2025-05-19 03:23:09 +0000 UTC View PostSo I’m a huge fan of games like The Room and Boxes, and I really wanted to bring some of that experience to Citadel LARP. Let’s set aside for a second the fact that the boxes in those games aren’t constrained by the cruel realities of Euclidean space the way my work must be. It doesn’t help that I...
2025-05-14 04:09:07 +0000 UTC View PostHey friends! I am excited to share with you today this sample of "Avenging Heart," an adventure I wrote for Wildmage Press's Horizons magazine. It's just a taste of the awesome stuff found in Issue 3, so get on over to Wildmage Press and read the whole thing.
2025-05-09 21:40:35 +0000 UTC View PostIf you’re like Kainenchen and me, you’ve been utterly obsessed with Blue Prince for the last month or more. Now, a roguelike puzzle game isn’t necessarily for everyone, but the lessons the game has to offer are for everyone with even a passing interest in dungeon design. This list is not exhaustive. You can help Harbinger of Doom by expanding it.
If you’re thinking about letting me know in ...
2025-05-05 15:46:26 +0000 UTC View PostOkay, I’ve gone away and had a long think about a core resolution mechanic for a Dust to Dust-based tabletop game. For aesthetic reasons, a core resolution mechanic for this game should involve dominoes, but what if it’s a combination dice-and-dominoes system? (The fact that both “dice-and-dominoes” and “Dust to Dust” involve initial letters very similar to another game we all know and many of us love is… well, it’s not a problem yet.)
This idea is less than 60 ...
2025-04-16 13:34:26 +0000 UTC View PostIt doesn’t seem possible that it has been almost two years since the last time I posted something about Ruby Talon Deeps, or that I first drew it almost three and a half years ago. Time is weird and I don’t think I like it. For some reason this feels possible to write only now, when earlier today I finished the first draft of another adventure.
One of my professional projects and working on Citadel LARP have converged on exploring magic item flaws of varying severity. The space between a flaw and a curse is largely semantic, but if you’re compelled to keep using the item that doesn’t work quite as advertised, that’s definitely a curse. In this post, I’m just trying to get the creative molasses flowing, because I’ve been so buried in other projects that this blog has been quiet… too quiet.
<... 2025-03-23 02:42:22 +0000 UTC View PostThe location described below is an idea that I’ve been pondering for awhile now: a relatively safe settlement in the Abyss that PCs can use as a base of operations for adventures in tiers 3 and 4. One of the things about the Abyss is that it can be so awful and corrupting that it’s hard to have a fun adventure. (D&D isn’t great at hostile environmental conditions of any kind.)
In the Astral Sea and ...
2025-02-19 01:41:39 +0000 UTC View PostIf you need some weirdos for your PCs to meet while exploring the dungeon, if you need a change of pace between two fights or just think a minor social encounter sounds like the thing, this table is for you! (The three other tables linked below could also serve, depending on your situation. Never overlook the potential of a bounty hunter tracking down a PC at the worst possible time, after all!
If the dungeon complex was sealed off from the world for centuries before the P...
2025-01-30 01:56:57 +0000 UTC View PostI liked the direction things were going in my last post, so today I’m continuing that with as many more Backgrounds as I can get through. Last time I covered Acolytes, Charlatans, and Criminals, so today I’m starting with Criminal (Spy).
I always thought it was cool to have a few Backgrounds that were closely enough related that you could use the same entry for them, wit...
2024-12-31 23:41:18 +0000 UTC View PostI’ve got a number of issues with the way the 2024 rules change Backgrounds from their 2014 form. In this post I want to dig into those issues and see if we can improve upon them. If I stumble upon something worth having, this could become a DM’s Guild release, much like my Level Up Your Background posts did.
Some of my issues here are addressed in the 2024 DMG, that o...
2024-12-16 17:48:27 +0000 UTC View PostWe’re in the run-up to the first full weekend event of Citadel LARP. The Citadel in the name is a dungeon for as much of that old-school dungeon-crawling feel as we can manage in a LARP, and one of the ways we do that is to lean into something that has been part of LARPing from the early days. A traversal challenge is an encounter (with or without combat) where the PCs need to cross through a hazardous area. In this post I’m going to talk about implementation and way...
2024-12-06 18:39:44 +0000 UTC View PostThe actual anniversary of my blog was a few days ago, and I was just so buried in other tasks that I’m only now getting around to writing this. Every year I like to talk about what I’m playing, what I’m running, and otherwise what I’m enjoying.
1. Aurikesh is still going strong after 12 years and 156 sessions. The PCs completed a huge story milestone back in September, and then my schedule blew up and we’ve only played one online session since then....
2024-11-22 22:12:16 +0000 UTC View PostI’ve been a huge fan of Robin Pierson’s History of Byzantium podcast since… whenever I finished listening to Mike Duncan’s The History of Rome (I also talked about Byzantine history here), and the part where Robin explains court titles and the importance of honors to the power dynamics of Eastern Rome fascinated me.
Pretty much every DMG ever printed h...
2024-10-24 13:27:20 +0000 UTC View PostIf you’re the kind of person who reads my LARP design posts, you probably already know about Citadel LARP (but I’ll link it just in case). This post isn’t solely about Citadel, though, as I’ve also started playing two other games recently, Alliance Atlanta and Resurgence ...
2024-10-06 03:59:41 +0000 UTC View PostIt’s been an incredibly busy month, and next month won’t be easing up, so I’m sneaking in under the wire to get a second post up in September. On the plus side, I think it’s all work that is making me a better writer. Because it matters in one or two places, these are written to 5e.24.
Wondrous Item, Very Rare
While you wear this silver crown, it grants the following properties.
The Honor of th...
2024-10-01 01:51:55 +0000 UTC View PostI’ve done a few posts now that are collections of NPCs you can drop into your campaign. I usually do sets of twenty at a time, but since these are going to have more description for each item, and both Patreon and Wordpress do awful violence to tables, I’m doing ten adventuring parties at a time and we’ll see how long of a series this becomes.
Each adventuring party gets a name (a good name is everything, because your PCs will use it a lot), the number of members, one lea...
2024-09-05 04:12:59 +0000 UTC View PostOver in Tribality, I’ve posted some initial thoughts on the 2024 Player’s Handbook revised rules. If you haven’t already seen that article, here’s the short version: I like a lot of things, but dislike a substantial number of changes too. Today I’m talking in more detail about the Keen Mind and Observant feats – what they were, what they are, what they might ...
2024-08-20 02:13:07 +0000 UTC View PostYou'll probably be getting this message from a lot of your Patreon backers, but if you subscribed to my Patreon through the Apple Store, please consider switching to subscribing through desktop or an Android device. In November, the Apple Store will start soaking up 30% of anything you pay to Patreon creators through them.
This Patreon isn't a major source of income for me, but it is for a lot of projects you back. Apple shouldn't get 30% for the absolutely nothing that it...
2024-08-12 19:26:16 +0000 UTC View PostIn my Aurikesh campaign, my PCs are in rebellion against the prince of the domain they live in. I've given them the names and brief descriptions of a bunch of the Prince's inner circle of advisors and military commanders. As much as possible, I wanted these characters to feel like the opposite numbers of PCs and preserve the illusion that they work like PCs. That's not really how NPCs work in 5e design philosophy, so I had to construct a stat block that created that illusion, ra...
2024-08-01 13:06:41 +0000 UTC View Post